[NEWS] Linux 5.10 LTS

[tle]

URL: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.10-Released

The LTS that we've been waiting for. Notable changes/features that is/might be related to PowerPC community:

* PowerPC 601 support was retired as the original 32-bit PowerPC processor. Meanwhile IBM continues bringing up POWER10 support in the Linux kernel.
* Continued work on the AMD RDNA 2 / Radeon RX 6000 series support initially introduced in Linux 5.9.

That's the good news, the bad news is amdgpu is still having regression with R9 Nano and 5700XT card.

UPDATE: the stock Fedora 33 5.10.16 (64K pages) somehow does not run into any issue with my R9 Nano GPU. I highly recommend you upgrade to later 5.10.x

[MauryG5]

Kernel 5.10.7, compiled and just tested. Compared to 5.9.16, it automatically switches to the video output of the AMD Navi 10 GPU and appears not to suffer from the fatal freeze bug when it goes to black screen to switch video output.
Also in this case I chose the solution of the pages in 4K and I left Wayland active.

[MauryG5]

Guys, I also compiled the Kernel for Ubuntu and as you can see, I can use perfectly and finally I would say also, the Navi 10 GPU. I put the new and just released 5.10.8, it seems that it works well, I am very happy with the results obtained , Pocock was absolutely right, just use the pages in 4K and all distros start working perfectly on Navi 10!

[tle]

Intriguing! Okay I'll give 4k page size a go this weekend and see if that would address the regression issue I am having with my R9 Nano card

[MauryG5]

Hi TLE, yes, you too try to do the same thing.  I have changed only 2 options of all those that are available in the Kernel that is, CPU used, the Kernels of various distributions must leave Power 8 because they must maintain compatibility with it, we can put Power 9 without problems, then in the Kernel settings  , where it says page size, I change the 64K which is default to 4K.  I don't do anything else and I got both Fedora and Ubuntu working and Pocock started Debian.  So it is evident that the real problem is the size of the pages, evidently the new drivers of these graphics cards have as a feature the change from 64K to 4K and that's why there are these continuous problems ... They leave the page size at 64K,  I also looked at all the settings of the latest Fedora Kernels made by them ...

[tle]

Far out it works! So 4K page sizes really fix the regressed driver issue in 5.10.7!

Perhaps we should convince mainstream distros to offer 4k page size kernel too just for the sake of compatibility.

[MauryG5]

Friend Daniel Pocock has already written to the Fedora team to say this, he had already understood the problem for some time and in fact we did some tests on Debian together with him. When I managed to get it started and he always told me that the problem was almost certainly the size of the page, I immediately wanted to try to compile a new Kernel to see if I could get it to work on Fedora as well and I did. Even for Ubuntu the same speech and therefore it is clear that everything is related to the size of the pages. Obviously in the latest driver updates they have made on the graphic cards, they have changed this setting, therefore being that all distributions, for us at Power are compiled at 64K due to the fact that our versions are designed for servers and therefore need more of the version 64K, developers continue to leave the size at 64K. It won't be easy to convince them to change at this point ... Hopefully they can do it or sooner or later ...